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1 " Although we cannot command it, we choose joy, making a deliberate commitment to happiness (essentially another word for peace). "
― Wendy Beckett , Sister Wendy's Meditations on Joy
2 " In grief, part of the pain comes from our feeling that we should not suffer so - that it is fundamentally alien to our being, this even though we all suffer, and frequently. Yet we reject suffering as a basic human truth, while greeting joy as integral to our very substance. "
3 " This is the real power of joy, to make us certain that, beneath all grief, the most fundamental of realities is joy itself. "
4 " Eccentric and secret genius that he was, Bosch not only moved the heart, but scandalized it into full awareness. The sinister and monstrous things that he brought forth are the hidden creatures of our inward self-love: he externalizes the ugliness within, and so his misshapen demons have an effect beyond curiosity. We feel a hateful kinship with them. The Ship of Fools is not about other people. It is about us. "
― Wendy Beckett , The Story of Painting
5 " God never sends suffering. Never. It is never "God's will" that we should suffer. God would like us not to suffer. But since the world brings suffering, and since God refuses to use His almighty power and treat us as foolish children, He aligns Himself with us, goes into Auschwitz with us, is devastated by 9/11 with us, and draws us with Him through it all into fulfillment. This is a high price to pay for our human freedom, but it is worth it. To be mere automatons for whom God arranges the world to cause us no suffering would mean we never have a self. We could not make choices. "
― Wendy Beckett
6 " We were created to be fully human - a lifetime effort - and using our minds intelligently and reverently is essential to full humanhood. But Rushdie talks throughout of making something sacred, whereas there is another kind of sacrality that exists of its own right. "
7 " Dear Lord, do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. "
8 " Normally, as we grow older, we become progressively skilled in coping with life. In most departments, we acquire techniques on which we can fall back when interest and attention wilt. It is part of maturity that there is always some reserve we can tap. But this is not so in prayer. It is the only human activity that depends totally and solely on its intrinsic truth. We are there before God, or rather, to the degree that we are there before God, we are exposed to all that He is, and He can neither deceive nor be deceived. It is not that we want to deceive, whether God or anybody else, but with other people we cannot help our human condition of obscurity. We are not wholly there for them, nor they for us. We are simply not able to be so. Nor should we be. No human occasion calls for our total presence, even were it within our power to offer it. But prayer calls for it. Prayer is prayer if we want it to be. "
― Wendy Beckett , Sister Wendy on Prayer
9 " It is not that we want to deceive... but with other people we cannot help our human condition of obscurity. We are not wholly there for them, nor they for us. We are simply not able to be so. Nor should we be. No human occasion calls for our total presence, even were it within our power to offer it. "
10 " The irony is that when Naaman accepted that no one could help him, that he alone must go down into the water, his bit was done. It was neither Naaman nor Elisha who worked the miracle. It was God. When we accept that no one can help us, that we alone must stand there in prayer, our responsibility ends. It is not we who pray, it is God. Prayer is His business. I was going to say from start to finish, but obviously the starting must be our own choice, our own decision. We have to will to let God take possession and stay in that will whatever happens or, more likely, does not happen. Nothing happened to Naaman in the Jordan. He had to persevere with his seven dips, and only then, as he came out, did his leprosy fall away from him. "
